The problem with working as a freelancer, it seems to me, is that you’re still trading your time for money. If you’re ill, or just don’t feel like working, you’re going to see the result on the bottom line.
What you need – indeed, what everyone needs – is a source of income that is unaffected by your mood swings, health and other stumbling blocks. As with many things, the Internet will provide.
Passive income is what it’s called. You do the work once, and your system brings in a constant stream of cashflow. But how do you do it? What are the actual steps you need to take?
I’m going to go into some detail about this over the next few weeks. But the information is all out there on the Internet.
The most important thing – the heart of the system – is an autoresponder service. Now, every email client comes with an ‘autoresponder’ – the thing that tells you that “Bob Smith is out of the office right now. He’ll get back to you just as soon as he can. Or how about never? Is never good for you?”
That kind of autoresponder’s great, as it goes. But what I’m talking about is a ‘sequential’ autresponder. This kind lets you create a whole bunch of follow-up messages. It lets you build a list of customers or prospects – people who’re interested in what you have to say. As they join your mailing list, it starts sending them messages automatically.
You can decide how often the messages are sent – a day apart, every two weeks, a month apart – whatever suits your personality. And the autoresponder system knows that Jim should get message number 7 today, and Kate will get message number 2 tomorrow. You can also send out ‘Broadcast’ messages – if you have something important to say, you can let everyone on your list know about it immediately.
There are a number of sequential autoresponder systems on the market. You can divide them into three groups.
1. Software which runs on your computer.
Don’t bother with desktop software systems. If you start sending hundreds of emails from your desktop every day, your ISP will close your account just as fast as you can say, “Spamming? Me? No, Never”.
2. A script which runs on your web server.
This is marginally better, but still liable to get you in trouble with your ISP. All it needs is one or two spam complaints (from people who are too lazy or stupid to click on the prominent ‘Unsubscribe’ link in your emails) and you’ll be getting that nasty email from your ISP.
3. A web-based service.
This is absolutely the best way to go. There are a large number of services out there, but the most popular with Internet marketers is AWeber. Having tried a couple of others, I have to say that AWeber is easier and faster than its competitors – and being stuck out here in the Internet boondocks, that makes a big difference. It costs around $20 a month, and you’re going to need a hosting service as well, which will set you back under $10 a month. You’ll also need a domain name, which is around $10 a year. So your monthly cost is going to be around R250.
Ok. Having identified the need for an autoresponder service, these are the seven steps you’ll need to take.
1. Choose a product to promote. We’ll start out doing affiliate marketing, choosing one product. We can always add more products later. AWeber lets you create ‘unlimited’ mailing lists, so we can easily create a new list for evey product – or a new list for every category of products.
2. Choose a domain name. We’ll go with a .com or a .org, because we’re going to be promoting to an international audience.
3. Choose a web host. There are thousands of web hosting companies out there. I’ll give you some tips to help pick a good one.
4. Create a squeeze page. The front end to our autoresponder system is a squeeze page, or name squeeze page. This is a simple web page which makes an offer of some kind, and asks the visitor to enter their name and email address. Once you have the web hosting in place, you can build a squeeze page for no cost – I’ll show you how.
5. Sign up with AWeber. Create your first mailing list. Create a sign-up form (in AWeber) and add it to the squeeze page. Test it.
6. Create a follow-up sequence for the autoresponder. This is crucial. You’ll need to decide how often you want to send out your messages. If you do one a week, you’ll need 52 of them. But you don’t have to write them all at once – as long as you stay a week or two ahead of your first subscriber.
7. Get traffic to your squeeze page. If no-one sees it, you won’t make any money. But there are a couple of simple and free techniques to get a steady flow of visitors to your squeeze page.
And that’s it! Do those 7 steps once, and you’ll be generating passive income for the months and years to come.
Would you like to know more? Squeeze Page Dossier is a free membership site which explains everything you need to know about creating passive income using squeeze pages and autoresponders.
Tags: autoresponder, autoresponders, aweber, features, mailing list, mailing lists, passive income, squeeze page
267 comments
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February 9, 2011 at 5:18 am (UTC 2 )
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